Buying a home can be a lengthy process. The amount of time it takes will depend on things like the type of place you’re buying, when the current owner can move and if you’ve got somewhere to sell as well. This guide looks at the steps involved in buying a home, how long these typically take, and what you can do to speed things up.
Before you can buy a home, most people need to get mortgage ready. Here are the initial steps you’ll need to take. How long these will take is, to some extent, down to you.
Check your finances
Your first move should be to make sure you’ve got a clear picture of your financial situation. You need to know about your savings, your income and your spending. Lenders often have online calculators to help you work out what you can afford. Bear in mind there’ll be additional costs – solicitor’s and estate agent’s fees and possibly stamp duty, for example.
Start your research
Once you know the sort of prices you can afford, you could start looking online and in estate agents’ windows at what properties are available in your price range. The amount of time it will take you to find something you really want could take anything from a few weeks to months or even years.
Get a mortgage agreement in principle
You can apply online to get a mortgage agreement in principle. This will confirm the amount lenders think you can afford to borrow. It’s also a useful indication to estate agents and sellers that you’re a serious buyer.
It can take as little as 15 minutes or up to 24 hours to get an agreement in principle from a lender. If you’d like help finding the right mortgage for you, you could consider approaching a mortgage broker to do this for you.
Once you have a mortgage agreement in principle, you can start looking at properties you’re interested in. How long it will take you to find the right place can vary enormously depending on what you’re looking for and what’s available.
Once you’ve found somewhere you want to buy, you make an offer. The seller might not accept your initial offer, and it may take several weeks to agree a price at all. Negotiations can take even longer if there are complications or the sellers are slow to decide.
Once you’ve had an offer accepted, you need to get a formal mortgage offer. You could go back to the lender who gave you the agreement in principle – and arguably that should make things more straightforward. But any lender will need lots of detail and evidence to reassure them you can afford to borrow what you need. They’ll also need to check the property value for themselves. This process is likely to take two to four weeks.
Once you and the seller have agreed a price and you have a formal mortgage offer, there are some legal and practical steps you need to take.
Instruct a conveyancer
Conveyancing is the legal process of transferring ownership. You need to appoint a solicitor who handles property law. Conveyancing is usually the most time-consuming part of buying a home. Be prepared for it to take up to 12 weeks. It might be quicker. But it can also take longer if there’s a chain – in other words when your sellers are buying somewhere and maybe their sellers are too. And if you’re selling as well, that could affect the timing. It means all the transactions are linked and if something goes wrong somewhere in the chain it affects everyone. Legal complications and the searches conveyancers have to do can also hold things up.
Get a survey done
You need to get an expert to inspect the property to check for potential problems. If there are any problems, you might want to change your mind about buying the property or you might want to make a lower offer. There are different levels of survey, so you need to decide how detailed you want it to be. It should be possible to get a survey done in a week or so. If the survey results in more negotiations, this might add more time to the process.
Once all the conveyancing and the survey have been done, you should be ready to go through the final steps.
Exchanging contracts
When everything is agreed, you ‘exchange contracts’. This makes the sale legally binding. At this point you’ll usually agree a date for ‘completion’ which is when the deal will go through.
Completing your purchase
Completion is the final step when money is transferred to the seller, and you get the keys to the property. It’s often a week or so after you’ve exchanged contracts. It’s also when you need to pay solicitor's and estate agent's fees, and stamp duty if it’s due.
Setting up your new address
Finally, you or your conveyancer register the property in your name with the Land Registry and you make sure the utility bills and council tax are in your name.
The main obstacles to a quick purchase include conveyancing issues, unexpected problems with the property itself exposed by the survey, and complications elsewhere in the chain. Conveyancing is inevitably a bureaucratic process. Renegotiations might be necessary after a survey. And these types of hold-ups might be affecting the other people in the chain.
The whole process can be quicker overall for first-time buyers because they’re at the end of the chain – in other words there should be fewer complications.
Fill in and sign any paperwork quickly and respond promptly to any queries. Keep in touch with your conveyancer and be ready to address any issues the survey throws up. If things get stuck along the chain, you could encourage your estate agent to put some pressure on the other agents involved to try and move things along.
In total, it’s likely to take three to six months to go through the whole process of buying a home from start to finish. Some of that depends on your approach. The more you understand the various steps, the better. For example, once you’ve got to grips with how mortgages work, you can start to compare various options. You can see deals from over 90 trusted lenders with Experian. And we’ve teamed up with brokers L&G mortgages who can provide advice.
We're a credit broker not a lender†